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kou shibasaki

I also made a [nomination] list of all my favorite foreign things of the last decade. If I had included all movies, general suspects would have applied (eg. Children of Men, Dancer in the Dark), but still remains a very ME list. I hope you like the selection, and don’t hesitate in suggesting films to watch.

You know, since Yu’s Itoh website re-vamp, the site sucks. They haven’t updated since forever, and they took out the section where Yu sometimes did short postings. However, the biggest drawback has been the lack of updates, and this is why I found out that Yu was on one of the episodes of Galileo 2 through tweets mentioning it (on June 3rd). So… nobody knew, I suppose?

So I had to catch up with Galileo 2 episodes, since I wasn’t watching the show due to the lack of much Shibasaki Kou, and was conveniently waiting for the subtitles (and a blank space in my schedule) to actually watch Episode 8.

I had missed Yu-chan so much.

Busted!

As you know, or maybe don’t, Yu’s been improving her cold-heart crime-committing girl persona. She did pretty great in her guest in Unubore Deka, and was great in Shokuzai. She’s actually been doing her bad girl characters a lot more interesting that her good girls (Double Face, Mottomo Toi Ginga). In Galileo 2 she’s playing an actress who’s obsessed with- hmm… let’s call it ” hardcore method acting,” so she’s obsessed with recording every bit of conversation she has in every day life, as well as her experiences, including how it feels to get away with 1st degree murder.

Though the episode seems to play straight-forward with a locked-room case and Yu’s character having the motive and access to commit the crime, there’s a twist- which is pretty obvious when you re-watch the show haha (the framing shots give it away), but with Yu’s acting going from calm to elated (for getting away with it), from elated to poker-face, to poker-face to complete hysterical satisfaction and landing in cruel reality… I don’t think I’ve ever seen Yu go through so much in one single sequence.

You know I really really love Kou Shibasaki’s acting (not so much her music), and she was easily the best part in that movie. And it’s not even that scene in which the chambers opened to a sight of pretty men bowing to her, and she tells them they’re a bunch of useless and pretty men. LOL

It’s always been tough to be a working actress on the big screen, as you turn a little older, offers often seem to be linked to “being someone else’s mother,” but cable television seems to be becoming more and more attractive to not only writers – because they get to write more challenging stories and skip censors – but also to women who were movie actresses and have found new complex roles to take on.

Based on the manga by Fumi Yoshinaga, Ooku — refering to the quarters of the Shogun’s female companions — tells the story of a fictional Edo era in Japan where women have become the dominant members of society, and males are sought after to reproduce.

Actress Kou Shibasaki will be playing the female shogun.

This made me think of the comic Y: The Last Man, which was the first ever comic I got into due to my roommate wanting me to read it. If you haven’t read it, do give it a look. You can be blown away.

As for the movie, the trailer kinda game me chills. Kou Shibasaki as the Shogun, such a marvelous idea. What’s Kazunari Ninomiya to do? xD